Küspert&Kollegen. Photo: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung, Wiesbaden, GermanyKüspert&Kollegen. Photo: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung, Wiesbaden, Germany

The German-Maltese Circle, in collaboration with the Goethe Institute, is offering a unique cinematic experience to film lovers – the opportunity to watch two German classic films from the silent era accompanied by live music performed by a German jazz band. The screenings will be held at the Embassy Cinema in Valletta.

On May 11, Tartuffe will be screened. Released in 1926, it was directed by F. W. Murnau, from a screenplay by Carl Mayer based on Molière’s original play. The film stars Emil Jannings as Tartuffe, Lil Dagover as Elmire and Werner Krauss as Orgon.

The Oyster Princess (Die Austernprinzessin) will be screened on May 12. This is a 1919 German silent film, a grotesque comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch, about an American millionaire’s spoiled daughter’s marriage that does not go as planned.

The jazz band performing the accompaniment to the films is Küspert & Colleagues, made up of Till Martin on saxophone, Dietmar Fuhr (double bass), Bastian Jütte (drums) and Werner Küspert (guitar). Küspert writes contemporary jazz, and his colleagues are popular concert and studio artists of international repute.

Küspert has brought together these professionals because they combine their skills with a great sense of cinema and say they are inspired by each frame of old black-and-white silent movies.

Over the past nine or 10 years, the German Maltese Circle and the Goethe Institute have been at the forefront of bringing the best of contemporary German cinema – together with special nights dedicated to giants of German cinema of the past – to Maltese and expat audiences.

For this event, which combines silent films with contemporary jazz, the GMC has gone back almost 100 years. Sirka Facklam explains how the inspiration for this event came about.

“From our experience of past German Film Festivals and in particular the response to the Classic Film Nights we have learned that in Malta there exists a deep appreciation among film lovers of German classic films,” says Facklam. “It has therefore been our ambition for quite a number of years to bring to the Maltese screens some films from the rich heritage of German silent films, which were produced in the early era of commercial cinema and which due to advanced digital technology have been restored in recent years and made more accessible to a larger audience.

“When we were approached by Küspert & Colleagues Jazz Band last year, with their proposal to compose original soundtracks for some silent films of our choice to be staged in Malta, we jumped at his opportunity. Mostly because this did not only offer us the chance to screen silent films with live music, but also the rare opportunity to create an event with exclusively composed music, which had never been performed before.

The event will bring together artists from times long gone by, who created the wonderful films, and artists of today, who will put the classic heritage into a contemporary context. I find this a very exciting concept.”

What do the organisers hope audiences will take away from it?

“We see the potential of reaching out to classic film lovers and music lovers at the same time,” says Facklam. “You can consider this to be a musical event or a cinematographic event – whichever way you prefer to look at it. It is fascinating in a way that with jazz tunes accompanying the original films, a completely new layer of the story might unfold, or different aspects of the story accentuated. Jazz music is very versatile and is therefore very suitable to add lots of atmospheric nuances to the film on screen.”

This promises to be yet another entertaining evening celebrating the best of German cinema, and the GMC is certainly not sitting on its laurels with preparations also under way for the Ninth German Film Festival scheduled for November this year.

Both Tartuffe and The Oyster Princess are certified U and each show starts at 8PM. Tickets  are available from The Embassy Cinema, Valletta.

www.germanmaltesecircle.org/stummfilme/

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